Cartog

Yup, I’m still too busy to take pictures the normal way but instead I’ve become a Cartog.

A Cartog or Car-tographer (not the map guys) or Car-Photographer is a lazy bastard that can’t be bothered to stop to look for pictures but instead opts to blast from the car.

I did recently see a cool book by a guy who made portraits of folk driving from a mounted camera on his car in the 70’s, it was ace, so this is clearly not an original idea.

Most of the time I’m framing as best I can with the 50mm Switar C-Mount ƒ1.4 cine lens, which isn’t easy because of the crop factor and stiff focus wheel, but other times it’s RAT-A-TAT-TAT (the machine gun noise of random fire)!

Sometimes random fire can be a positive lucky experience with results that almost look deliberately composed like the two photos above (that was luck).

Sometimes random fire can offer you a new composition, it’s kinda fugly and weird, but the more I look I think – yeah, I like it for some reason or another, like the five above.

Obviously, the hit rate of random fire is low but with a digital camera you can experiment, I’d never do that with any of my film cameras.

The reason these kind of pictures are invading my photo stream on Flickr and my blog is because I’ve changed my work pattern, I’m either starting late and working late or vice versa often arriving at work around 7am-ish or leaving around 6pm.

All I see is darkness with the odd slice of grey in between but hopefully sooner rather than later daylight will stretch out it’s long glowing fingers across the skies like fish fingers of hope.

It’s important for me to drive down a quiet country road at 7am randomly firing flash out my car window at unsuspecting trees and bushes with a wide-open ƒ1.4 lens on a digital camera that can barely render an understandable image at ISO 3200.

It’s important to experiment, it’s important to let go, it’s important to have ‘fun‘….

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– there’s more

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– and more

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– still more

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And that’s that.

I’ll be moving house at the end of the month so there will be very few updates here and to Flickr until my internet gets connected on the 5th of March.